Water:
26 litres of Luton’s finest, boiled for 30 minutes the night before with half a camden tablet. This was cooled overnight and then I ran off 25 litres ready for brewing, leaving 1 litre and all the chalk to be disposed of.

Mash Schedule:
Mash In: 5.3 litres of water at 78℃ for 45 minutes
Mash Out: 2.1 litres of water at 98℃ for 10 minutes
Sparge: Fly sparge with 17.5 litres of water at 76℃

Look at that change in colour!

Brewed 21st January 2012

Mashed the 2kg of malt according to the schedule, and ran off 24 litres of wort at a disappointing OG of 1.019 (expected pre-boil OG was 1.029). So, I added 45g of light dried malt extract to bring the wort up to the target OG of 1.029.

After the boil, again the measured OG was way below target – I measured 1.026 in 16 litres of wort, but the expected target was 1.050 in 10 litres! So I had to add yet more extract (300g) and sugar (600g – as I ran out of extract) to bring the OG up to 1.045.

The wort was cooled using a copper immersion chiller, and then transferred into the fermentation bucket and pitched with 750ml of the yeast starter. The other 250ml was put into the fridge – we’ll see if it’s viable for another batch in the future.

Not a perfect brew day, but there’s a lot more beer there than was expected – silver linings and all that…

There was good fermentation after 18 hours, and this kept going for another 4-5 days. After 7 days, I moved the wort into the barrel, OG was measured at 1.014, where it stayed for another 7 days before bottling (primed with 58g of brewers sugar) – the FG at bottling was 1.008, so we should be looking at about 4.8% ABV in the end.